Canada’s Western Hudson Bay
polar bear population has fallen 27 percent in just five years,
according to a government report released this week, suggesting
climate crisis is impacting the animals.
Researchers have flown over the region — which includes the town of Churchill, a tourist destination touted as the “polar bear capital of the world” — every five years to count the number of bears and extrapolate population trends.
This has made the
population not only the best studied group in the world, but
also the most famous, with the local bear-viewing economy valued
at $5.30 million annually.
During the last survey in late August and early September 2021, the results of which were released earlier this month, they spotted 194 bears and, based on that count, estimated a total population of 618 bears, down from 842 five years earlier.
This is a roughly 50 percent drop from the
1980s.
“In some ways, it’s totally shocking,” said John Whiteman,
chief research scientist at conservation non-profit Polar Bears
International.
“What’s really sobering is that these kinds of
declines are the kind that unless sea ice loss is halted, are
predicted to eventually cause … extinction.”
READ MORE:
Global heating could wipe out polar bears ‘by 2100’
Decline in female bears
Polar bears depend on the sea ice to hunt, staking out over
seal breathing holes. But the Arctic is now warming about four
times faster than the rest of the world.
Around Hudson Bay,
seasonal sea ice is melting out earlier in the spring, and
forming later in the fall, forcing bears to go for longer
without food.
Scientists cautioned a direct link between the population
decline and sea ice loss in Hudson Bay wasn’t yet clear, as four
of the past five years have seen moderately good ice conditions.
Instead, they said, climate-caused changes in the local seal
population might be driving bear numbers down.
And while it’s possible some bears may have moved, “the
number of adult male bears has remained more or less the same.
What’s driven the decline is a reduced number of juvenile bears
and adult females,” said Stephen Atkinson, an independent
wildlife biologist who led the research on behalf of the
government.
This change in demographics doesn’t fit with the idea that
bears are moving out of western Hudson Bay, he added.
“There was a very low number of cubs being produced in
2021,” said Andrew Derocher, who leads the Polar Bear Science
Lab at the University of Alberta. “We’re looking at a slowly
aging population and when you do get bad (ice) years, older
bears are much more vulnerable to increased mortality.”
Also of concern to scientists, the report suggests declines
have sped up. Between 2011 and 2016, the population only dropped
11 percent.
There are 19 populations of polar bears spread out between
Russia, Alaska, Norway, Greenland and Canada. But Western Hudson
Bay is among the southernmost locales, and scientists project
the bears here are likely to be among the first to disappear.
A 2021 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found most of the world’s polar bear populations are on track to collapse by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t heavily curbed.
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